Theme and Variation in Music and the Visual Arts

Join us for a lively conversation between composer David Sanford and writer Christopher Benfey, who will explore connections between music and the visual arts. Their discussion will focus on examples from contemporary music and jazz, with special reference to the prints of Bauhaus and Black Mountain College artist Anni Albers. This event celebrates the Museum’s new exhibition Anni’s Orchestra: Theme and Variation in the Prints of Anni Albers guest-curated by Christopher Benfey.

Followed by a reception in the Hinchcliff Reception Hall.

This program is made possible by the Natalie Doernberg Hofheimer Program Fund

Christopher Benfey is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age including A Summer of Hummingbirds, which won the 2009 Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. His family memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay (2012) has a section on Anni Albers at Black Mountain College. Benfey is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

David W. Sanford is the Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College and the director of the David Sanford Big Band. As a composer, he has received commissions from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Barlow Endowment, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, Chamber Music America, and the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations. His honors include the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters which recently elected him a member.  

Anni Albers, Orchestra III, © 2025 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York